Youth Soccer League Starts New Season

The Just One Soccer League launched its season Saturday under cold, raw skies but with international flair.  

Assembling at the refurbished Newark Schools Stadium on Bloomfield Avenue, a parade of children, some of the youth league’s 700 players, carried flags representing nations in FIFA, the governing body of professional international soccer. “Nations” from New Zealand to Nigeria to Ecuador to Brazil flew their colors Saturday.

A beaming Mayor Cory Booker helped introduce the teams and their coaches as they completed a circuit around the running track. Council members Anibal Ramos and Carlos Gonzalez also attended the kickoff.   

Founded 17 years ago, when there were just a handful of kids “in a mudhole,” the league now boasts about 700 Newark youth playing on 56 teams with 70 coaches, said Oscar Rodriguez, who founded the league. Twenty of the league’s current coaches are former players, Rodriguez added, reflecting its growing impact in the city.

Teaching young children the fundamentals of the world’s most popular sport is merely one goal of the league -- and not even the most important one, Rodriguez said.

“It’s about mentoring. It’s about social change,” he said. “Soccer is the vehicle we use to promote social change.”

“Just One Soccer is a great program that’s promoted healthy lives for the children of Newark for the last 17 years and hopefully will be doing so for many years to come,” Gonzalez said.

Just One Soccer has partnered with the New York Red Bulls, the Harrison-based professional soccer team. The Red Bulls are sponsoring a group night later this month, where Just One Soccer players will get to attend a game. The Red Bulls also run a soccer “academy” where the most promising players from throughout North Jersey are selected for weekly training, said Steven Jones, a representative of the Red Bulls training program.

Such academies, common elsewhere in other soccer-playing countries, are “the first stepping stone in the process” of becoming a professional player, Jones said.

Also attending Saturday were members of "the Viking Army," a group of Red Bulls supporters. The group has pledged to donate $15 to Just One for every goal the Red Bulls score this season.